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Huge Number of People Who Used to Like Elon Musk Now Detest Him, Polling Shows

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American statistician Nate Silver has found that billionaire Elon Musk's popularity has fallen off a cliff.

Billionaire Elon Musk's popularity has fallen off a cliff — a particularly precipitous decline, because he used to be immensely popular before squandering it.

According to the latest polling averages aggregated by statistician Nate Silver, the richest man in the world's favorability is in free-fall, with a mere 39.4 percent of Americans seeing Musk positively, while a majority of 52.7 percent see him negatively.

In total, that's a net favorability of -11 points — a significant drop since Donald Trump took office at the beginning of the year, when it stood at -3 points, and a stomach-churning plunge from 2016, when his favorability was a glowing +29.

We just launched an Elon Musk popularity tracker to accompany our Trump approval tracker.

Currently, he's at a ?14 as compared with Trump's ?5. pic.twitter.com/X4IIvLIhmk

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) April 11, 2025

The latest numbers highlight an astonishing degree of disillusionment with Musk's indiscriminate and sloppy slashing of government budgets with the help of his so-called Department of Government Efficiency. His embrace of far-right extremist views has also proven extremely polarizing, with the billionaire going as far as to perform two Nazi salutes during Trump's post-inauguration celebration.

Anti-Musk sentiment has risen considerably since then, inspiring an entire movement, called Tesla Takedown, which has seen thousands of people peacefully demonstrating in front of the EV maker's dealerships.

The carmaker has seen its sales plummet as a result across the globe. Many investors have also grown fed up with Musk's antics and refusal to fully commit his time to the company.

How much longer Musk will continue to gut the government remains to be seen. Trump recently suggested he could be out in the coming months.

Experts have since speculated that Musk's unpopularity could be a political liability for the president, who's battling issues with his own favorability. Trump's ratings have dipped this month, following a disastrous rollout of global tariffs.

"Although Musk may eventually leave the government, he’ll remain an exceptionally important and controversial public figure even if he does," Silver wrote. "Until then, he could be a liability for Trump because he’s less popular than the president is even as Trump’s numbers have also declined."

The cracks are already starting to show. After Musk threw $25 million behind Republican judge Brad Schimel, who ran against liberal candidate judge Susan Crawford during a pivotal Wisconsin Supreme Court election earlier this month, Crawford beat Schimel handily.

It was a resounding defeat for Musk, who went as far as to hand out $1 million checks to voters in a desperate bid to sway election results.

Could his backfiring political efforts be a sign of what's still to come? Given that he's widely expected to leave his post at DOGE — while potentially falling comically far short of his initial goal of excising $2 trillion from the government budget — it remains to be seen whether surging anti-Musk sentiment will die down again.

But now that Tesla's brand has been raked through the mud, it'll likely take some time for his favorability to recover.

More on Musk: When Elon Musk Hears About Lives He's Destroyed, He Reportedly Responds With Laugh-Cry Emojis

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Huge Number of People Who Used to Like Elon Musk Now Detest Him, Polling Shows

You’ll Never Guess What That Millionaire Biohacker Is Measuring on His Teenage Son

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Amid his expensive efforts to live forever, biohacker Bryan Johnson is now comparing something really weird with his 19-year-old son.

Amid his bizarre and expensive efforts to reverse aging or gain eternal life, tech founder-turned-biohacker Bryan Johnson is now — we wish we were making this up — comparing his erections with those of his 19-year-old son.

In a post on X-formerly-Twitter, the 47-year-old longevity enthusiast presented what he refers to as "nighttime erection data" for himself and his son, whose name is Talmage.

As the Braintree founder explained, the younger Johnson's erectile "duration" was two minutes longer than his own. If the confusingly-marked dashboard shared in the post is to be believed, each man had roughly three hours' worth of erections per night, and the son had exactly one more "erection episode" than the five his father experienced.

"Raise children to stand tall, be firm, and be upright," Johnson added, in case readers weren't yet feeling quite enough secondhand embarrassment. He also added in another post that his son is his "best friend," which would be sweet in almost any different context but seems awfully weird in this one.

Unfortunately, Johnson having five boners per night seems to suggest that his single-minded quest to return his penis to its youth — which has also involved the man having his long-suffering genitals electrocuted and shot up with Botox, is working. As studies have shown, the average 20-to-26-year-old man also has five erections per night. Similar studies suggest that nocturnal erections decrease progressively with age, dependent on various health factors and quality of sleep.

Per the dick dashboard data, both father and son have an "AndroAge" of 22. The elder Johnson may even have the edge over his son on "average erection quality," whatever that means, with his being scored at a 94 while the younger's was a mere 90. The data also indicates that the 47-year-old is getting more "efficient" slumber than his 19-year-old son, likely due to the elder's extremely strict sleeping habits that see him in bed by 8:30 PM with little "arousal" beforehand.

As you may recall, Talmage Johnson last made waves nearly two years ago when, at age 17, his father was infused with his teen blood in hopes of receiving its regenerative powers, while giving some of his own blood to his own dad. Jarringly similar to the "blood boy" plot line on HBO's "Silicon Valley," that gruesome scenario brought Johnson — an early investor in Futurism who hasn't been involved with the site for years — into the public eye.

Back in 2023, biochemist Larry Brenner of the City of Hope National Medical Center in Los Angeles told Bloomberg that the practice of young blood transfusions is, to his mind, "gross, evidence-free, and relatively dangerous."

"The people going into these [longevity] clinics who want anti-aging infusions basically have an anxiety problem," Brenner elaborated. "They have an anxiety problem about their mortality."

With all we've seen from Johnson over the past few years, we can't say we disagree — though "going meat for meat" with his own son, as one X user put it, really takes the cake.

More on Johnson: Tech Guy Doing Bizarre Things to Live Forever Says He Now Suffers From Endless Hunger

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No, Donald Trump Isn’t Wading Through Hurricane Floodwaters, You Absolute Morons

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No, Donald Trump didn't wade through Hurricane Helene-caused flooding in blue jeans. That

Get Your Waders

An image depicting former president Donald Trump wading through floodwaters alongside a fellow disaster responder went viral on social media this week.

But there's one tiny problem: the image is an AI-generated fake, as multiple publications have confirmed.

The image, which shows Trump wearing a lifejacket and blue jeans as he marches through thigh-high waters, first picked up steam on Facebook last weekend.

And it doesn't hold up to virtually any degree of scrutiny. Trump's right hand is distorted, and the lettering pictured on either man's clothing is completely illegible.

The former president has visited some areas impacted by the storm, but there are no credible reports of the candidate physically going into floodwaters in blue jeans, making it only the latest instance of highly politicized AI slop ahead of the presidential elections next month.

Slop Flood

As of publishing this article, the image has garnered over ten thousand likes on Facebook.

"I don't think FB wants this picture on FB," the poster wrote in a caption, implying the social media giant may have been removing the post for political reasons. "They have been deleting it."

Despite alleged censorship, the image was shared roughly 160,000 times in just two days, according to a fact check from USA Today. (The photo is still live on Facebook, though has been flagged with an "altered photo" warning and a link to an independent, third-party fact check.)

The image quickly spread to other corners of social media, where users captioned the synthetic image with notes about how "they don't want you to see this side of Trump" and messages to leaders to "not tell me how much you care about Americans... show me though [sic] your actions."

The fake image of Trump is one of many AI-generated fake photos to circulate in the wake of the deadly storm, which wrought extensive damage throughout parts of Appalachia.

Further and Further Apart

Other AI-generated images of alleged hurricane devastation have depicted scenes like flooded homes, abandoned, sad-looking dogs on roofs, and men in knee-high water barbequing.

Most notably, a widely-shared AI image showing a crying young girl clutching a puppy while evacuating in a canoe has made its rounds on X-formerly-Twitter, where it's been repeatedly shared by right-wing influencers and close Trump allies.

As far as the health of our information world goes, the apparent believability of these images is troubling. The fact that so many netizens are taking clearly AI-generated images at face value is a damning indictment of the extent of media illiteracy plaguing the US today.

More on AI and misinformation: Facebook Is Being Flooded With Gross AI-Generated Images of Hurricane Helene Devastation

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Trump Posts AI-Generated Image of Kamala Harris as Joseph Stalin, But Instead It Just Looks Like Mario

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Donald Trump shared an AI-generated image of Kamala Harris designed to invoke Joseph Stalin — but she actually looked much more like Mario.

MAGA's AI onslaught continues.

This weekend, doubling down on accusations that presidential contender Kamala Harris is a Marxist communist (she isn't), former president Donald Trump took to Truth Social to boost a clearly AI-generated image of Harris donned in communist attire, Stalinesque mustache and all.

It wasn't the first time that Trump has used AI to attack Harris. Last month, days after falsely accusing his rival of using AI to fake the appearance of large crowds greeting her at a campaign stop — and, in the process, arguing that a presidential candidate using AI to create fake images should warrant disqualification on "election interference" grounds — Trump posted an AI-drawn image of a red-clad Harris speaking to a herd of Soviet-like figures, a hammer-and-sickle flag waving overhead.

It is, however, the first time he's boosted propaganda that makes his opponent look like the iconic Nintendo character Mario. Here we go!

The image was taken from a Substack post by a writer who works at the Gateway Pundit, a far-right digital publisher notorious for publishing stories promoting baseless allegations that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump (copious evidence, and many judges he appointed, have found those claims to be false.) Trump reposted the image and a link to the Substack post — which described Harris as a "rock-ribbed socialist" — without comment.

The image is ridiculous, of course. It doesn't look at all real, and as netizens pointed out on social media, the fake Harris' fictional stache moreso invokes the vibe of Nintendo's beloved cartoon plumber than it does the feared Soviet dictator.

"The only thing this post makes me wanna do is vote for Kamala," wrote one X user, "and then play Super Mario World on my old Super Nintendo system."

"BREAKING," added comedian Jason Selvig, "Donald Trump accuses Kamala Harris of being a heroic plumber who saved Princess Peach from Bowser and his evil Koopa army."

Convincing or not, though, the image does highlight the reality that generative AI — particularly Elon Musk's guardrail-free Grok model — is increasingly being used as an easy-bake propaganda oven. After all, not all image-based propaganda is expressly designed to look real. It's often cartoonish and exaggerated by nature, and in this case, doesn't exactly look like something intended to sway staunchly blue voters from Harris' camp. Rather, this sort of propagandized image, while supporting a broader Trumpworld effort to portray Harris as a far-left extremist, reads much more like a deeply partisan appeal to the online MAGA base.

To wit, though many self-avowed Harris voters mocked the fake picture, the likes of right-wing X poster Phillip "Catturd" Buchanan latched onto it — as did his followers, who responded with quips about "Comrade Kamala" and, in several cases, AI-generated images of their own.

Trump wasn't the only far-right figure to employ AI this weekend to further communist allegations against Harris. On Monday, in response to an X post from the Harris campaign that referenced Trump's vow to be dictator on "day one" of his second term, X owner Musk used the platform he bought in 2022 to share his own AI image of Harris decked out in communist garb.

"Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one," Musk sarcastically captioned the image. "Can you believe she wears that outfit!?" The post has yet to receive a Community Note indicating the use of AI, and is also lacking a fact-check to the false allegation that Harris has vowed to be a "communist dictator on day one" (she hasn't.)

Musk's clearly faked photo drew criticism from users across X, ranging from "Happy Days" actor Henry Winkler to former United Nations deputy secretary-general Jan Eliasson.

"Just straight up disinformation, with no parody label or community note, from the owner of this site and the guy with the most followers," wrote Zeteo editor-in-chief and former MSNBC commentator Mehdi Hasan. "Anyone who claimed he wouldn't use this platform to push rightwing conspiracies and help elect Trump must be feeling pretty dumb right now."

The use of AI by Trump — not to mention his richest and most influential supporter — to further highly politicized attack lines reflects the ever-increasing surreality of the 2024 election, a political contest being battled out on the back of a nearly-ten-year stretch of chaos, fake news, and the endless whir of muddied social media information. It also certainly underscores a recent argument made by The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel, who observed that the "meme-loving" MAGA aesthetic and the hyperreal tone of AI slop are, in the murky annals of social platforms like X, increasingly merging together.

On that note, like Trump's Truth Social-boosted Lenin-slash-Mario image, Musk's X post drew some support in addition to derision.

"I can believe it," wrote one X user in the billionaire's comments. "Kammunism."

More on Trump and AI: After Falsely Accusing Kamala Harris of Using AI, Donald Trump Posts AI Slop About Her on Twitter

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